The only drawback to flying by helicopter was the noise. Unless Rothchilde wore one of those ridiculous radio headsets, he had to yell for his pilot, Frederick, to hear him.

The bird banked left, Rothchilde’s dinner almost leaving his stomach from the maneuver. Below them, streetlights and headlights sparkled like stars, competing with the real deal overhead. The Chicago skyline could be seen in the distance, anchored by the blinking antennae of the Sears Tower and the Hancock Building.

Rothchilde decided it might be prudent to leave the country for a few weeks. He wasn’t sure how this whole DruTech mess was going to resolve itself. The best scenario had Manny killing Theena and Bill, and then dying himself. But things seldom ended neatly.

The smart thing would be to send in his own troops and clean the place out—bodies, evidence, everything. Unfortunately, Rothchilde had murdered both of the people he could use to do that, Halloran and Carlos. Their bodies would be found, and Rothchilde wasn’t anxious to answer persistent questions from either the police or the mob.

So he would go on vacation. Let things settle down. He’d get his lawyers on it, extricate himself from the situation, and get everything back on track. The military contract should still hold up, and he already had some places picked out in Mexico for N-Som production.

Rothchilde yawned. Before he could do anything, he had to take care of Halloran’s headless corpse, decaying in his office. Messy. Rothchilde tried to think of someone he could call to assist him, someone who would ask no questions. But he didn’t place his trust in many people.

His servants would to it, if ordered to. They feared him. Maybe he could have them wrap up the body, haul it someplace secluded, and then Rothchilde could kill them, too. No witnesses. The only problem was replacing them; it was so hard to find good help these days.

Rothchilde rubbed his eyes. Exhaustion seemed to settle on him like a thick blanket. Sleep now wouldn’t be wise. He needed to be alert and focused to deal with everything happening.

There was N-Som back at the mansion. He hadn’t taken any since the day before, so he was ready for another dose.

But he didn’t have to wait until he got back home, did he?

Rothchilde stuck a hand in his pocket and pulled out the capsules Theena had made from Halloran’s brain. He’d killed the captain just a few hours ago, but already the memory of the act was fading.

Maybe what he needed right now was a refresher.

He opened the onboard cooler and took out a Perrier. The pill went down easily, bubbles mixing with a pleasant tang of residual blood, and he settled back in his seat, ready to re-experience his first murder from the victim’s point of view.

Rothchilde closed his eyes, a sweet smile settling on his face. The anticipation was exquisite. Better than the Christmas Eves of youth, waiting for Santa.

The first effects of N-Som were sensory. Sounds became blurry, touch was muted. Opening the eyes yielded a dark, fuzzy world, which dimmed as the drug took hold, eventually spiraling the user into blackness. Then the dreams began.

But Rothchilde felt nothing.

He waited. Normally, he’d have been under by now. Was it taking so long because the sample was fresh? Theena mentioned that she didn’t have all the equipment to make pills at the lab, and so she’d given him a capsule. Did the fresh stuff take a longer time to get into the bloodstream?

Minutes passed. His smile faded. He began to wonder if the little whore had duped him.

A moment later, he realized just how duped he had been.

Albert Rothchilde had forgotten how to breathe.

He thought he was unconsciously holding his breath at first, tense because the N-Som hadn’t kicked in. But when he tried to inhale, he found that he just couldn’t. His lungs refused to obey.

His eyes flapped open and he tensed, the first stirrings of panic building inside him. This was impossible. A person just didn’t forget how to breathe. Breathing was automatic. He opened his mouth and sucked in his stomach, trying to fill his lungs. It didn’t work.

Had Rothchilde known anything about anatomy, he might have noticed that Theena hadn’t harvested the parts of Halloran’s brain normally used for N-Som production. Instead she’d gone deeper down, into the brain stem, and taken sections of the medulla oblongata.

These fibrous neurons housed a very primitive part of the brain; the reflex centers. They controlled a person’s swallowing, sneezing, heartbeat, blood pressure, and breathing.

Just as a regular dose of N-Som overrode a person’s thoughts, this refined dose was overriding Rothchilde’s instinctive knowledge of how to breathe.

Rothchilde began to see red. His lungs screamed at him, begging for air, but his brain was full of reflex neurons that had frozen in death.

His heart stopped next, in mid beat. The pressure in his chest was excruciating. Every nerve cell in his body fired, sending out distress signals to the brain in the form of pain. Rothchilde’s brain responded by ordering the release of adrenaline, which did nothing but heighten his awareness of his terrible situation.

Rothchilde thrashed in his chair. Every muscle in his body burned, starving for oxygen. Black spots mingled with the red in his vision. He tried to scream, but nothing came out.

The pilot, Frederick, couldn’t have done anything even if he’d left the controls. All of Rothchilde’s systems were crashing. The reflex center of Rothchilde’s brain was convinced it was dead, and it was just following orders.

Rothchilde went rigid as he was seized by a spasm of pure agony. He voided his bowels and bladder. His vital organs began to shut down. Rothchilde was helpless, and aware that he was helpless, and the frantic struggle for breath coupled with the body-wracking pain was more than his mind could handle.

The neurons in his head all fired at once, and during that microsecond they burned into him an eternity of torture without escape.

He was no longer rational at this point, or he might have seen the irony. He had, after all, wanted to experience Halloran’s death.

Frederick began emergency landing procedures, but there was no hurry.

The president of American Products was dead long before they touched the ground.